The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand. [Frank Herbert]

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If you are anything like me you will have multiple virtualboxes running on your system. Sometimes you might want to run a copy of a virtualbox for different purposes. Like running an Oracle 11 Devdays instance as test environment but also running the same vbox for customer testing. If you copy the vbox and try to run it in the manager you’ll be presented with an error that a harddisk with the same UUID already exists. Here’s how I solved it.

After the backup has completed you can start changing the UUIDs for the VirtualBox. Open the <virtualboxname>.vbox file in a text editor. There are a couple of UUIDs that need to be changed:

First look for the <Machine> tag (2nd tag in the xml file). One of the attributes is uuid={some_uuid}. You can change this to your new uuid. This is where the generator comes in, just generate a new uuid and paste that here.

Next you need to change the uuids for the harddisks. This is a little more tricky. Find the tag <Harddisk> and look for the uuid attribute. This uuid is used multiple times in the xml file. Also in the StorageControllers section. The easiest way to keep these in sync is to do a search-and-replace over the entire file. Search for the current uuid, replace with a freshly generated uuid. Before you change the next one. you also need to change the uuid in the harddisk file. You do this running a command line utility VBoxManage. The command is like this: <path_to_virtualbox>VBoxManage internalcommands sethduuid <filepath> <uuid>

Repeat this process for all the harddisks that are defined. This way you can have multiple instances of the same VirtualBox in your VirtualBox Manager.

You may want to change other settings like MAC Addresses for your network cards, but you can do this using the VBox interface.